Personalize your outreach: Tools and Tips for Prospecting

Why should you personalize your Prospecting? 

The simple answer is that you’ll sell more! In fact, 72% of consumers say they now only engage with marketing messages that are personalized and tailored to their interests. People are already tired of bots, they want to speak with humans.

When it comes to outbound marketing – in line with sales outreach – you can use LaGrowthMachine’s sales automation software to generate high-quality B2B leads!

By activating your leads with automated outreach techniques, you can mass-market while maintaining impeccable, and personalized, targeting, otherwise known as “mass customization”.

For your information, here are the results of one of our more successful campaigns:

All the sales team has to do is set up a meeting or send an email to eventually close the deal.

Understanding your customers and what their needs and likes are will allow you to communicate with your prospects on another level.

Rather than a blanket statement to everyone on your list, you’ll be able to conduct your outreach in a more clear, personal way.

Create a relationship 🤝

If your ultimate goal is to get them on a call, you’ll be more effective by using personalization for your prospecting. This is especially true for longer-term buyer cycles because not only will you be top of mind, but they’ll get to know and trust you. 

Creating a relationship relies heavily on understanding their point of view. The right messaging will reflect that because you’ll be speaking to their common challenges directly. In fact, you can ask them for an interview to discover their pain points directly. 

Bonus: Interviewing your prospects will help you to build the relationship while learning what you need to know to help them with these pain points.

For example, you know that IT managers have a challenge with being contacted for everything in their company. Your solution allows for their business users to do certain reports or activities themselves. You have the answer to their problems so communicate that without reminding them of the old midnight commercials trying to sell them something they don’t need.

Increase ⬆ your reply rate

By creating custom messages, you’re creating a relationship based on your prospect feeling understood. If they feel understood, you’re already ‘on their side’ in their eyes. This is likely because what you’re saying resonates with them.

Bonus: If you use LinkedIn, your reply rate will be 3 times higher than that of a regular email.

Communicate in a way you know they can relate to. It will help bring their guard down a little that we all have now for new people. If they’re open to learning about you and what you do, then they’re more likely to give you a chance and provide honest feedback – which inherently means more replies.

How to Personalize your Prospecting

Hearing that you need to personalize your prospecting, you may think of a ton of ways or zero ways to do it. Whether you’re the ideal person or not, these tips will help you both create and automate to help you save time and still be on-brand.

Target your audience 🎯

Do you know who you’re sending a message to? 

It may sound ridiculous, but many messages are sent every day with the ‘spaghetti method’: throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Targeting specific job functions, companies, or geographies will allow you to be so much more specific in your messaging that you can’t miss! 

In our own research, we’ve analyzed messages sent to audiences with smaller amounts and they get a remarkably large number of responses versus messages sent to more people. While your instinct might say sending to more people is better, smaller audiences mean more custom messages can be sent.

For example: You want to reach out to HR Directors in North America. Create a list specifically with those people in great detail using the filters in Sales Navigator. Add in filters to help you reduce the number of prospects in the list such as geolocation, industry, company size, and more.

Using the above video’s filters, you can now compose an email such as:

Dear [HR Director’s name],

You’ve been looking for a software that can help your team identify the right people who will improve your Marketing business despite the amount of resources you have.

I wanted to contact you today because I am looking for testers of our new software that does [A, B, and C]. 

Would you be interested in seeing if this would be a good fit for you and your company?

Sincerely,

Jacob

Creating a customized message does not have to contain something about them personally, but about the general stressors of the job, region, or industry. You’ve heard them tell you what’s bothering them and your product can help. Identify that for them and they’ll feel heard enough to check it out.

Once you’re done identifying your perfect target, you’d want to learn more about how to search for people on LinkedIn. Here’s a thorough guide on How to Look for People on LinkedIn by Name.

Use the data

Consider if someone messaged you with a message like this:

Hi Robert,

You’ve likely received numerous messages telling you how important they are and how great they are.

My goal here is actually to tell you that you’re doing great already! The tools you have been provided have not given you nearly as much help as they should and you’re still killing it. 

However, if you’re looking to save some of those tedious tasks for an AI so you can focus on more important things, feel free to reach out to me at ____.

Look forward to hearing back,

Janice

Would you be more likely to respond or find out more with this message than if someone dove right into saying how great their product is? I’m willing to bet you are much more likely. 

Using data you’ve collected or knowledge you have of the industry can shed light on their pain points. It can allow you to communicate directly with them, even if you don’t know them personally. 

Personalized prospecting images or GIF

Dale Carnegie said, “A person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.” This holds true for images. Seeing our own name on an image makes us feel important. Customizing an image for your prospects boosts your trust level.

Creating custom images on tools like Microsoft Paint or Canva may be nice, but creating it in automation is ideal if you’re reaching out to hundreds of people. It’s easy for us to fall back on tools we already know, but utilizing tools made for other purposes can be twice as useful.

A tool created for marketers to advertise – Abyssale – has also proven to be an extremely useful way to create custom images or GIFs at scale. You can also use a tool like Uclic to integrate with your email and create personalized emails in combination with your favorite prospecting tool like LGM.

Personalized prospecting landing pages 

One option is to have your IT and Marketing departments develop custom landing pages for your prospecting. Another is to develop simple pages on your own. Tools like Webflow make it fairly easy to upload your contacts and create a place where people can see their name ‘in lights’. 

Making people feel connected helps them see you and your products in a different way. They don’t feel like just another warm body being sold to. You’ve put in some extra effort and that goes a long way with people. 

These landing pages can be a great way for you to display everything about you and your company and how you help. Adding testimonials from current or previous clients is an added bonus, too. 

If you don’t have the ‘social proof’ of testimonials, ask your customers for them. These have proven to be an excellent way to promote your business – and yourself. In fact, they generate 62% more revenue on average.

Personalized prospecting video 📹

If a picture is worth 1000 words, a video must be priceless. Creating a video that is personalized to the recipient is an incredibly useful and unique tool. It’s becoming more popular so there are always new technologies developing. Currently, VideoAsk is one of the better tools out there to create custom videos – and at scale.

The idea is to develop a way for you to use the prospect’s name, company, or pain points within a video format. Seeing it in an image is impactful, but imagine how special they’ll feel seeing their name in a video! 

Automate your Personalized Prospecting

One thing you want to be sure to do is automate every process you can saving yourself time is also an important piece of your client prospecting . Take care, however, to be human within your automations. Creating a message that sends to everyone with exactly the same message is not humanizing the process.

Try out some tools that will help you like these:

LaGrowthMachine

Getting automation prospecting into your toolbelt is a perfect way to help you reach more people in less time. LaGrowthMachine will create a pipeline of leads for you by automating how you contact each lead. 

Setting up a template of workflow is easy as well so you can identify the contacts you want to reach, how you want to reach them, and when you want to reach out. It could look as simple as this:

Or as complex as this:

Regardless of the complexity of outreach, you’ll be able to automate many steps in the process by knowing exactly who you want to speak with and what you’ll say. If you want to stick to LinkedIn only, there are many LinkedIn automation tools to help you automate that as well.

Zapier, IFTT

Tools like Zapier and IFTTT (If This, Then That) can help you connect different systems you use regularly. These tools will help you automate tedious and consistent tasks like adding an email address to your CRM every time you receive an email from someone new. 

These and other tools will help you do everything from tweeting new stock prices to emailing you a reminder to go for a walk every day. Think of all of the things you do on a daily basis that you wish you had an assistant for and there may be a tool to help you.

Get a Little Creative

Regardless of the way you choose to personalize your prospecting, be sure that it fits you and your brand as well as your company’s. Try to be original and surprising rather than doing what everyone else does just because it works for them.

Creating a unique outreach may feel like a big undertaking, but using these tools will help save you time, give you motivation, and help inspire new ideas. People don’t want to feel like just a number. Above all, have fun with it and get to prospecting!